A piece in the i Paper today – “Reddit is ugly and utilitarian – but it’s the best space left on the internet” – sings the praises of Reddit. It does so through the lens of writer Zing Tsjeng enjoying a site that doesn’t demand you “market yourself as popular, attractive or palatable”. But in later admitting the site “isn’t perfect, of course”, the piece misses the chance to dig deeper and therefore overlooks key issues with Reddit that aren’t immediately apparent.

I do agree with the i about certain benefits. Reddit being largely text-based is increasingly rare in an internet obsessed with video and brevity. It allows for – and often encourages – depth and discussion, due to being essentially a bunch of specialist forums glued together. Its algorithm isn’t great. But create an account and Reddit will mostly stick to things you actually want to see, rather than ‘doing a YouTube’ and rapidly steering you towards extremism. It stands in stark contrast to the instant gratification of TikTok or the endless void of AI-generated slop that is a modern Facebook feed.

But. The piece calls Reddit “one of the few remaining platforms safe from capitalism’s onerous demands”. It then, crucially, qualifies that statement with, “to market yourself as popular, attractive or palatable for the online gaze”. I say crucially, because that caveat is vital. It aligns with the piece’s objective: to position Reddit as a place where you can be yourself. But by narrowing the definition, that dodges some uncomfortable truths, which are some of the places where Reddit starts to go bad.

The piece claims that in being “[f]reed from the need to appeal to the algorithm or establish a personal brand, people can actually be themselves” and this “fuels the brutal honesty behind notorious confessional subreddits”. In some cases, this is true. But Reddit has a karma system, which is often ‘farmed’ (gamed), a process that has been accelerated by the onset of AI. Long-time users have watched, glumly, as many of their favourite subreddits (Reddit’s jargon for ‘dedicated forum’) slowly descended into a game of spot the AI post.

For the most part, automated posts (regularly recycled) are confined to those huge subreddits, because they are the best places to farm karma. But AI has impacted the site in other ways. Users increasingly copy-and-paste from ChatGPT, just as they do everywhere else online. But on Reddit, this erodes the platform’s reputation for expertise. I recently witnessed a surreal argument about handheld console specs, with someone doubling down on their inaccurate, clearly AI-generated information. The result? People bought into it and said they’d ‘upgrade’ to a device that in reality didn’t offer the claimed benefits. Quite why they didn’t research outside of Reddit is beyond me, but for some people Reddit is the internet, in the same way older folks barely leave Facebook. Regardless, it shows Reddit isn’t immune from AI.

In fact, Reddit the company is in very much in favour of AI, largely because it long ago realised it could sell Reddit content as training data. This is, remember, user-generated content. Without that, Reddit is nothing. But the users won’t see any of the spoils. And if this alone makes you question whether Reddit is one of the good guys, the platform’s attitude was laid bare during what Wikipedia calls the Reddit API controversy. In short, Reddit brutally went after third-party apps, such as the popular Apollo, made unfounded accusations against Apollo’s creator, and sparked a wave of subreddit blackouts. When the Reddit leadership’s patience wore thin, the company simply threatened to replace moderators if they didn’t reopen their subreddits – and then followed through. That ended any pretence the platform is meaningfully democratic or, for that matter, meaningfully different from its rivals.

None of this necessarily contradicts the i paper’s subjective claim that Reddit is the “best space left on the internet”. But even if you agree (and, for the record, I don’t), the conclusion must be that it’s merely the best of a very bad bunch.

Sega killed loads of mobile games. You can save them. But, as I write for Stuff, you shouldn’t have to. This piece looks at how Sega Forever became ‘Sega For About Eight Years’, the ephemeral nature of digital games, and how (and why) the industry should embrace emulation. 

5 reasons to buy the Trump Mobile T1 Phone 8002 (gold version) was my second column for Stuff this week. Long-time readers might imagine it’s not entirely serious. Indeed, it suggests “[…] millions of idiots will buy one. Are you one of them?” Natch, I got angry ‘fan mail’ from someone who I imagine owns a red cap with MAGA written on it.

The new Spotlight for Mac is amazing – and I want it on my iPad. I’ve long been a fan of ‘pro’ launchers like the original Quicksilver. I write that I’m glad Apple’s getting in on the act – but would love the new Spotlight on iPad too.

Apple Intelligence live translation in iOS 26 is AI done right. Lest anyone think I only moan about Apple, here’s a second positive Apple article in one week. The heat must be getting to me. There are caveats with translation, but for personal use I’m excited about more people being able to communicate. This strikes me as a good use of AI.

But AI is mostly still terrible. This past week, WhatsApp gave someone another user’s number, AI-gen music on Deezer is being consumed by AI bots to make people money, and ChatGPT is offering to tailor translated articles for submission to specific magazines. That last one’s like Inception-level rights infringement – and equally terrible for editors and newcomers looking to break into journalism. 

Password advice remains terrible. You may have read Cybernews and others reporting on a massive hack. The snag: few concrete details are in the wild and yet publications reported this with clickbait headings and terrible advice. A commonality on the latter was ‘experts’ telling people to regularly update passwords. Genuine expert Kate Bevan said on Bluesky, “Actual experts say you shouldn’t change passwords unless you think they’ve been compromised. Also, SMS is better than no 2FA, but it’s the weakest method of 2FA: use an app to generate codes.” She uses Authy. Other options include Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, and Apple Passwords. Additionally, she points to the NCSC’s guidance from 2018 on why you shouldn’t regularly change passwords. Publications need to do better when giving advice on this subject.

I wrote about why it feels hotter in a UK summer than you might think. Unsurprisingly, quite a few people countered that by saying that, actually, where they live, 31°C is like being in a fridge, having not read the piece. Sigh. (I also just checked local humidity readings. For the past week, they bottomed out in the mid-50s and mostly lurked in the mid-80s or higher. Bleh.)

Bluesky is still dying. According to a Spectator columnist, who then adds: “Which is a shame, because I don’t want these people back on Twitter”. Reader, these people do want us all back. To save you a click, this is another piece by someone who doesn’t like Bluesky and didn’t bother to integrate. Increasingly, I hear people countering this narrative, saying that Bluesky is great for engagement and traffic. (Wired said much the same in its most recent print issue.) The Spectator piece does have one important point, though: if the decline in users becomes an ongoing trend, Bluesky might be in trouble. Mastodon might be fine as a quieter, niche online space, but it strikes me that for Bluesky to succeed long-term, it needs scale.

The English language is changing. Watching a Girl Gone London video about ‘zed vs zee’, she noted globalisation is causing Brits to use more Americanisms. I see this myself and suspect the dominance of US English will eventually win out. Most publishers and companies I work for prefer US-English (Stuff being a rare exception). British children’s books use as much US-English and terminology as they can get away with, to push sales. And Brits taking in so much US media is echoed in vocabulary changes that, honestly, I sometimes find grating. Yes, old man shakes fist at cloud. But when ‘pants’ is being used for outerwear rather than underwear, I grumble a bit. And I’m absolutely going to draw the line at ‘faucet’, because come on.

The new tvOS is a bit rubbish. I was going to write about this, but I’m not sure I need to now. Joe Rosensteel says everything in tvOS brings minor additions and weird priorities, covering Apple’s slew of terrible UI decisions (including glass effects and profile frictions) and the only major new feature being faux-karaoke.

Duolingo is probably dead to me. In three days, my plan renews. But I’m over it. Extended time with it has made me more aware that the system is more about gamification and engagement than learning. Most changes Duolingo has made have been for the worse. And the CEO is an AI bro with no understanding of why people don’t want that infecting their already compromised experience. Babbel is the most recommended alternative, according to people giving me advice. My one concern: mini-G (10) has racked up a streak now well north of 1000. I hope she continues – in Duolingo or elsewhere.

Make your iPhone more minimal! If you want to. This is my selection of cracking apps that get out of your way and four beautifully minimalist, simple games.

Retrospecs is on sale for $0.99/99p. The app lets you load a photo or video and makes it look as if it had been generated on anything from an ancient Commodore PET through to a SNES or a Mega Drive. It’s a wonderful app – easy for newcomers, yet with loads of things to fiddle with for retro geeks. Buy it!

You might have seen reports about a heatwave in the UK. Then you might have looked at the temperatures and thought: what? What? Readings this week have been in the high 20s, and where I live are predicted to top out at 31°C on Saturday. (That’s high 70s to high 80s in old money.) Surely that’s just… lovely? Bit of sun. Bit of warmth. Get over yourselves, wimpy British people!

But no. Because various factors add up to make things pretty uncomfortable here. We don’t, as a rule, have air conditioning. It’s increasingly common in cars. Some offices and shops (mostly supermarkets) will have some kind of cooling units. Often ineffective ones, mind. Homes? Vanishingly rare. And those homes? They’re designed to keep heat in. Mostly brick-built. Heavily insulated. Smallish windows. No air flow. And speaking of air flow, there’s not much of that either right now. No breeze at all. Plus, it’s humid, due to the UK being a weirdly shaped island surrounded by sea.

There’s no time to prepare and build resilience either. If you live in a place that’s very regularly hot, you become acclimatised. The UK, though, frequently flips seasons at almost any time of year. A week and change ago, we were tempted to put the heating back on in our house. With wind chill, the ‘feels like’ factor outside was in single figures (mid 40s, in ye olde degrees). During evenings, we were wearing fleeces and wrapping up in blankets. Now I’m sitting in my office, just after 9am, with a fan blasting into my face, watching the temperature readings on our smart radiator gadgets tick ever upwards. The windows are open and that’s doing nothing. Fans are on, which is basically blowing hot air around. Even nights aren’t helping, with their lack of breeze and temperatures stubbornly only briefly bottoming out in the high teens (mid 60s). And sunrises before 5am mean if you do leave the windows and curtains open, you’re going to wake up at stupid o’ clock.

Despite all this, I personally would take heat over murk. We often have ‘summers’ in the UK that amount to six weeks of cool grey. I am solar powered. I love the sun. But the heat can be tricky to deal with. And because of the various factors outlined above, not least the fact that for many people there’s just no ‘escape’, it can feel an awful lot more uncomfortable, stifling and intense than you’d otherwise realise from the temperature numbers alone. In short, it’s hotter than you might think. So maybe think a bit before rattling off yet another “pfft – the Brits are just wimps” post when, here in the UK, we all feel like we’re melting.

I’m open to work. Sorry to start this weeknote with a blatant plug, but it is what it is. A long-term engagement ended last week, and I’m now looking for what’s next. If you or anyone you know needs someone to smash some words into shape (articles, case studies, press releases, App Store page copy, poems about your favourite giraffe, etc), please let me know.

WWDC25 happened. You probably noticed. I wrote about it:

• Liquid Glass: Apple vs accessibility digs into the accessibility implications of Apple’s new design language.
• Apple’s Liquid Glass looks like it’s beamed in from the movies. I don’t think that’s a good thing is a broader response to the aesthetic decisions Apple has made.
• Hands on with iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 – what’s slick and what’s half-glassed? in turn looks at Liquid Glass, unified iPhone app layouts, and iPad windowing.
• I got hands on with the next-gen iPad software: has Apple finally fixed iPad multitasking? is a deeper dive hands-on with the new iPad windowing system, which I really like.
• The quiet exit of the Home indicator in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 is another positive piece, with Apple (in the earliest dev betas at least) fixing one of my long-standing gripes about iOS and iPadOS.

Here are some of my favourite WWDC25 pieces from others:

• Joanna Stern’s superb interview with Apple software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak: full interview | short version.
• Fidelity in design by Howard Oakley criticises Apple’s ongoing obsession with windows that have rounded corners. As I’ve said elsewhere, it half feels like the next macOS will have fully circular windows. Even today, rounded corners cause other problems, not least on iPadOS.
• WWDC25: macOS Tahoe Breaks Decades of Finder History by Stephen Hackett skewers the abysmal redesign of Finder’s icon.
• Clip got stuck in notarization hell, says creator Riley Testut, with Apple rejecting his app because it didn’t do anything if Full Access wasn’t enabled. Thing is, that’s none of Apple’s business with an app for a third-party app store, like this one is. This is surely yet another DMA violation the EU won’t be happy about.
• Craig Federighi sounded like he was taking the piss with this exclamation: “Wow! More windows, a pointier pointer and a menu bar? Who’d have thought? We’ve truly pulled off a mindblowing release!” Maybe he was trying to acknowledge that Apple, after many years, had finally reached an obvious fix for iPad interactions. At best, something got lost in the edit.

Phew. Moving on. Ish…

The Apple Games app falls short. Huge shock, I’m sure. I wrote about my hopes for it last month. Here’s how Apple fared with my wish list:

1. Nail the basics: All covered, but sometimes implemented poorly.
2. Highlight controller support: Surprisingly, yes. But buried (Library > hamburger).
3. Add landscape support: Yes.
4. Embrace openness (LOL): Indeed a LOL so far – not even any app pinning, which is insane.
5. Recommend good games: No better than App Store, alas.
6. Not get bored after 11 seconds: We shall see…

Also on games, Daryl Baxter argued Apple should draw on the Pippin for a new iPhone gaming controller. Brave bringing up Pippin at all, but I get where he’s coming from in wanting a controller that could have AirPods-like multi-device pairing. However, I’d be concerned Apple would try to reinvent gamepads, like it did during the MFi disaster.

However, I disagree with Baxter’s argument that “other inputs work terribly with gaming”, by which he means non-traditional ones. With conventional gaming, sure, touchscreens aren’t ideal. But when you design specifically for them, that forces you to rethink gaming conventions, which can lead to innovative ideas. The problem today is relatively few games are iPhone-first because Apple pissed off so many devs. Instead, games come to the iPhone from other platforms, where they’re designed for gamepads. That makes the touchscreen’s perceived limitations more apparent.

AI is still doing bad things. I enjoyed a quote from planetmatt on Bluesky: “AI looks impressive in every area in which you are not a subject matter expert. In that area, it’s always a joke.”

I’m seeing this a lot these days, notably from people who think ChatGPT can generate amazing copy because it can write better than they can. But it falls short of what writers can do. Turns out, ChatGPT also falls short of an Atari 2600 when playing chess and in, um, not driving people mad. Oh dear. One piece of AI good news, though: Wikipedia has paused AI-gen summaries after an editor backlash. As Suw wryly noted on Bluesky: “But… most Wikipedia articles already have a summary. It’s the first few paragraphs at the top of the page.”

More things!

Good news in apps: superb camera Obscura has been added to my classic apps series. Thanks to Ben Rice McCarthy for their thoughtful answers.

Bad news in apps: Sega discontinues Sega Forever mobile games. In hindsight, that series didn’t have the smartest name.

Bank warnings have jumped the shark. It’s bad enough when I get scary warnings when making purchases on national retailer websites. But this week I got one when transferring money between two accounts with a bank, while using the bank’s own website. Naturally, this is banks shifting responsibility on to customers. When a customer gets scammed, the bank will say they were warned. But they’re training users just to click OK for everything.

New coeliac tests incoming. A report claims this will remove the need for a ‘gluten challenge’, where you test for coeliac disease by consuming loads of gluten over a period of weeks. Despite many years of increasingly serious issues that may map to coeliac, I’ve never had a test. I’d be too scared, because it would leave me bedridden and unable to function. So this new news is very good news.

Twitter isn’t coming back – ever. I’m still seeing people on Bluesky (and, very occasionally, Mastodon) sad that Twitter is gone. To be fair, when I left in 2023, it was a wrench. Lots of friends and communities were lost to me. But even then, I missed what Twitter was, not what it had become. Today, I very rarely venture on to X, but have sanity-checked my ‘filter’ feeds, and most of the folks I followed have gone too. Maybe half are now on Bluesky and Mastodon. I’ve no idea about the others.

There still seems to be this idea we can somehow press a magic button to bring Twitter back, but it was a moment in time. Even if X wasn’t a hellhole today, the way the world has changed would make it a very different place from back in 2015. And, as it is, X is a ghoul wearing Twitter’s bloody corpse as a onesie. Enough.

No-mow May has become no-mow June. Again. And I’m fine with that. I enjoy letting the front garden grow and just seeing what happens. It feels alive, unlike gardens mown like a buzzcut every week. We have crickets and gigantic Oxeye daisies. The mow-happy… don’t.

To say iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have been divisive is putting things mildly. Much of that is down to Liquid Glass, which at best needs a lot of optimisation before these operating systems ship later this year. But look beyond that and there’s a lot to like, the most notable revamped feature being vastly improved iPad windowing.

Often, though, it’s smaller changes that can make or break an operating system. And one change has me doing a happy dance: the Home indicator no longer scythes across the bottom of the screen, above the app you’re using. I’ve grumbled about the Home indicator for years. I wanted an off switch – the means to get rid of it for good. Because the last thing I need when playing a game, using a music app, or reading, is a distracting line lurking at the bottom of the screen.

In the ’26’ dev betas, Apple hasn’t provided an off switch in Settings, but it has introduced the next best thing. Actually, it’s arguably created something better. When you switch to an app, the Home indicator now elegantly fades. Further interaction with the app doesn’t make it reappear. Instead, you have to make a deliberate upwards swipe from the bottom of the screen to bring it back.

I’m no fan of hidden UI. Apple seems a bit obsessed with hiding settings, menus and tabs away, and that can make things difficult for people. But just this once, I’m going to make an exception, because the interface element I least liked on iPhone and iPad is no longer an irritant and a nuisance – it’s there when I need it and gone when I don’t.

Edit: As per a comment I received, I should note that the ability to switch between apps with a swipe at the very bottom of the display remains, regardless of whether the Home indicator is visible. So what Apple has removed is the visual distraction, not the functionality. When you swipe, the indicator immediately reappears.